I just found some information about the narrow no-break space, which is more recent than the thin space and presumably more promising for French writers and about its font support. Here.

Like presumed, ADE is flagging it with a question mark. Even using a supported font (TNR), on my -old- PRS-505, I get the same question marks.

So, if I prepare an EPUB with these narrow spaces, it seems it will be moreless the same as with the thins spaces. Only the "new generation" of e-readers seems to be able to transcribe them correctly. French will have to wait a little...

So, if I prepare an EPUB with these narrow spaces, it seems it will be moreless the same as with the thins spaces. Only the "new generation" of e-readers seems to be able to transcribe them correctly. French will have to wait a little...

I've always thought that French always requires non-breaking spaces before two-part punctuation characters (e.g. colons, question marks etc.).
Are thin spaces automatically treated like non-breaking spaces? If not, aren't you (theoretically) running the risk that a punctuation character is separated from the preceding word and moved to the next line if the user changes the font size?
BTW, I've read conflicting information regarding the recommended width of a space character before a two-part punctuation character in French. What's the correct width according to your research?

No clue. I just learn to work around things like that (once I'm aware of them) rather than dwelling on them.

I have put in an issue in the list about this some time ago. In older versions this behavior was not present (0.4.2 or even lower) and I really want to see those entities. If you can't see them, you never know if they are there until the book is already finished and on the readers. I really dislike question marks when they don't have to be there...

/hopeful / Could you name one of them (if possible, free, regular, serif) ?

Now I'm using Minion Pro (not free), but I believe it works with Droid Serif (free) too.

If I remember correctly (I don't have the reader here to try), narrow non-breaking spaces didn't work with the Gen3, and they only work with the Orizon if I enable hyphenation. It seems hyphenation triggers the use of a newer rendering engine, with better font support. When I enable hyphenation narrow non-breaking spaces (and many other kinds of spaces) are turned into question marks.

In reality, I'd prefer not to have to include these thin spaces. In LaTeX, for instance, I can just say that I'm writing in French, and automatically all punctuation that needs has some space (non-breaking, of course) added before/after it. I wish there was something similar for ePub (and there's no reason why a rendering engine could not implement it).

In reality, I'd prefer not to have to include these thin spaces. In LaTeX, for instance, I can just say that I'm writing in French, and automatically all punctuation that needs has some space (non-breaking, of course) added before/after it. I wish there was something similar for ePub (and there's no reason why a rendering engine could not implement it).

It would be great. I will ask Henrik Just about it. He is probably familiar about it because he develops Writer2Latex, of which W2X is only a subset.

Actually, what I meant is that the thin spaces shouldn't even be in the code, they're just a display thing. But short of that, adding them when the conversion into ePub is done would be already an improvement.

Actually, what I meant is that the thin spaces shouldn't even be in the code, they're just a display thing. But short of that, adding them when the conversion into ePub is done would be already an improvement.

I published a regex emulating them from &nbsp;
Just a lookalike. But ADE does not like thinsp and nnbsp so it's just a - clumsy - workaround.

Here is it to be used for example with Sigil as a regex (all html files).

In all too many Project Gutenberg .epub 's the blue footnote number is superimposed on the text. This is probably due to their automated usage of epubmaker and their one size fits all settings thereof.

To fix - get into the .css part of the epub (Sigil works well for this). For PG it is /Styles/0.css
The right alignment is incorrect. Amend .footnote .label to have the right position to be at 91%

When setting a relative image width (such as 50%), create a left margin that is half of the remaining page width. In the example below the image width is 50% of the screen so the left margin is set to 25%.